1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to maximizing page yield in the display of advertisements to searching Web users, and more particularly, to determining optimized display depth on search results pages to maximize page yield.
2. Related Art
Online service providers (OSP) are oftentimes also advertisement brokerage providers, which serve advertisements (“ads”) to pages of content providers or publishers. The advertisers pay the OSP for click activity on served ads; the OSP in turn pays the content providers for the traffic attracted to create the click activity, keeping a percentage as a fee. The OSP also include search and media businesses services to acquire, identify, and serve ads to Web searchers (variably referred to as users or consumers) who seek information on products or services and who want to transact business online or offline.
Every query or information request is associated with a search or a browsing action to a web page, which may include ads. For a query, such as “dental services,” the OSP matches and serves relevant dentists for the searcher. Sets of queries create the notion of “keyword market.” Historically, an OSP tends to fill all the available advertisement slots on a Web or search results page with ads, e.g., the OSP attempts to maximize the number of ads given the available inventory of ads without systematically capturing a market response through consideration of the relative responses of the users and the advertisers to the keyword market. More specifically, attempts to maximize page yield have not systematically captured user and advertiser responses in order to optimize a business objective, revenue, or click yield. Page yield refers to the amount of click-related activity obtained from a given set of advertisements displayed on that page.